Thursday, January 20, 2022

My latest column: “Stop Fear; Choose Faith”

January 20, 2022

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK 

There are many things we should fear; the inevitable is not one of them. It is a fact that death comes for all who live. We began this new year of 2022 with continued abuse of trust through lies and scaremongering on the Internet and social media in connection with the dangers of COVID.
There used to be a tight wicket through which potential news had to pass before it could appear in what was once a plentiful field of newspapers thriving in healthy and self-policing competition.
This paper is one which continues that gold standard of factual basis required before publication. Integrity also requires retraction when errors are discovered.
The Wild West of the Internet has made separating fact from fiction more difficult than ever. Complicating this phenomenon is the collapse into yellow journalism of once-trusted big city newspapers.
The fear of death and dying has been exploited by the mix of fact and fiction in the COVID 19 phenomenon. The restrictions, the lockdowns, the masks, the mandates have contributed to a pandemic of anxiety and mental illness.
Now we must add to this the civil rights violations of firing workers and expelling military members who refuse the experimental injection. Yes, vaccines often work; but no vaccine can prevent death. A disease with a 97 percent survival rate never warranted such an aggressive campaign playing so loosely with the facts. Hesitancy is warranted when one adds to this the thousands of unexplained deaths among the vaccinated.
So, death is a fact. We encounter it every day — in the tragedy of a New York apartment fire, in the death of the elderly from the flu together with pneumonia or other underlying morbidities and in the stillborn baby. We are free to deny the fact of death if we choose. The consequences, however, are equally inescapable.
Without acknowledgment of death, life itself is half-born. Denying death gives birth to a thousand and one pathologies some of which, ironically, can bring about the dreaded end more quickly.
And these are merely the natural consequences. The spiritual results are eternally dire. The ancient spiritual and psychological quest for answers continues bidden or not, because the human person yet faces the same death that has haunted mankind since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden.
The greatest library of books setting down the Revelation of God retains fascination for mankind. We see a sign of man’s continued relentless pursuit of answers to the ultimate questions of life and death in our own day. The “Bible in a Year” series by Ascension Press reached the status of number one overall podcast in the United States last year.

Read the rest: https://thewandererpress.com/catholic/news/our-catholic-faith/a-leaven-in-the-world-stop-fear-choose-faith/

No comments:

Post a Comment